Hope, Healing & Freedom Podcast : Ep 27
TRANSCRIPT
This is Lee Whitman.
2 Cor. 5:17, “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation.
Tom is one of my golf buddies. He is also a club-thrower. What I mean by a club- thrower is that when Tom is not having a good round, or he hits a crucial shot poorly, he takes his anger out by throwing his golf club. I can relate because I am a recovering club-thrower myself. There were many times my golf club flew further than the ball I just hit.
I got Tom talking on one round about why he got so angry when he made a bad shot. He told me about how his dad used to try to motivate him by making fun of him. When he’d hit a bad shot his dad would say something like, “You really ought to be hitting from the women’s tee box,” or “You might as well quit right now, you’ll never be good enough to play with the big boys.” Tom still hears those statements in his head when he misplays a shot. His bad shot says to him that since he can’t perform up to his dad’s standards then he’s a zero-worthless. He learned from his dad that what he does determines who he is.
Driven to Perform
We live in a world that teaches us “Who I am is what I do.” One of the strongest drives we have in this life is to find value and acceptance. Unfortunately, we are often taught that the means to getting value and acceptance is through performance. On a human level this drive to perform is genetically wired into each one of us, and it is fed a steady diet from very early in life when we begin learning what it takes to be a “good boy” or a “good girl.” As John Lynch said in a sermon titled True-Faced, “As early as we can remember we have performed for acceptance. If I’m good enough, talented, diligent, beautiful, together enough, right, correct enough, I will be loved and accepted, and blessed and happy. And if not, I will be rejected and receive a lousy life.”
In a desperate attempt to become gain value and acceptance we look to our behavior to provide these things. If we can become good at a sport, we can be somebody. Or if we can sing or make beautiful music, we can be somebody. If we are blessed with good looks, or can get good grades, or have some other talent that causes us to stand out from the crowd, then according to this performance-oriented world, we can be somebody. If we can’t do or be any of those things, we are told that we are not worth as much as those who can. Instead of being somebody, those who can’t perform or measure up to the societal standard are told they are a nobody who has no value and are not worth loving. The mandate falls on us to make sure our performance measures up to the standard in order to receive acceptance and value.
And even for those who are able to perform up to the standard, the pressure is on them to continue to perform so they don’t lose their status. The treadmill of performance keeps moving and they have to run to keep pace, or risk falling off and losing their status. It is a vicious and exhausting system for everyone, for those who can meet the standard and for those who cannot.
This system didn’t begin with our modern fast paced society. This performance-based system really began back in the Garden of Eden. When Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they set into motion a new system for getting needs met. It is a system that is not based on the goodness of God as He originally intended but based on man’s self-effort. As a result, mankind has struggled to perform in order to achieve value and gain identity ever since. Thus, in this world what you do equals who you are.
This performance-based thinking is never more evident than when circumstances change and a person is unable to perform as they had in the past. The change could happen due to health reasons, or due to the loss of a job, the failure of a marriage, the children moving out of the house, or just the passing of time that takes away their ability to perform as they had before. People struggle trying to figure out who they are now that they can’t perform as they had in the past.
Jerry had always been the go-to guy. As far back as he could remember, when there was a problem, Jerry had the solution. He was the star athlete, the guy with the right answer to a problem, and the guy that could help other people solve their problems. He was so good at solving problems that he became a highly paid business consultant. He was the go-to guy. When Jerry had a heart attack at 43 years of age, his whole world came crashing down. His health was so drastically affected by the heart attack that he could barely stand long enough to walk from one end of his house to the other. His mind was so foggy that he could hardly carry on a coherent conversation about the simplest things in life. He went from being the ultra-capable and self-sufficient go-to guy to needing help from his wife to even get dressed in the morning.
Jerry was a believer in Jesus, but he had lived his life according to that mythical Bible verse that says “God helps those who help themselves!” And because he was so talented and capable, he didn’t need anyone’s help to be successful, including God’s. He was living a performance-based life completely independent of his relationship with God. Unfortunately, it took a debilitating heart attack and the almost total loss of his abilities for Jerry to come to realize that he had been living a lie.
This entire performance based system is based on a lie. When we look to our performance to give us value and tell us who we are, we are looking to the wrong source. God never intended for us to get our value or our identity from what we do. He intended for us to get value and identity from who we are. Or better said, “Whose” we are!
At the moment we accept Jesus Christ as our Savior and receive forgiveness for our sins, the Bible says that God places us into Christ. 1 Cor. 1:30 says, “It is by God’s doing that you are in Christ Jesus.” Being “in Christ” is a term of identification. As Dennis McCallum says in his book Walking in Victory, “This phrase, ‘in Christ’ is completely different from the statement, ‘Christ in me.’ This is what theologians call ‘identification with Christ’. It means God has acted in such a way that we have become identified with Christ. Therefore, as far as God is concerned, what is true of Christ’s standing has become true of us.” (Dennis McCallum, Walking in Victory. Pg. 22)
Let’s look at what being ‘in Christ’ means for you. When Christ died on the Cross, what happened to you? Galatians 2:20 says, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.” When Christ died on the Cross, you died with Him. Not your physical life, but the old sinful nature that you inherited from Adam and Eve died with Christ on the Cross. And the life that you now live is Christ living His life in you and through you.
Romans 6:3-6 paints a clear picture of what happened to you the moment you entered into Christ at salvation. Verse 3 says “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death.” The word “baptized” used here means “to join to or immerse into.” So, when you were baptized into Christ Jesus, you were joined to or immersed into Christ in His death so that when He died, you died with Him.
Then verse 6 says, “knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.” It says that your old self was crucified with Christ. It is something that has already happened when you were joined to Christ.
The fact is that even if you were able to 100% stop sinning before you accepted Christ, it would not have been enough to get you into Heaven? You inherited a sinful nature from your ancestor Adam. God had to destroy your old self, which was that sinful nature, by placing you into Christ and nailing your old sinful nature to the Cross with Christ so it would die with Christ.
In Christ you have a brand-new nature. 2 Cor. 5:17 says, “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation.” You are not still the same old person, minus the sin that Christ paid for on the cross, as some would suggest. No! You are a completely new creation in Christ with a totally new identity. According to author David Needham in his book Birthright, “A Christian is not simply a person who gets forgiveness, who gets to go to Heaven, who gets the Holy Spirit, who gets a new nature. Mark this – a Christian is a person who has become someone he was not before. A Christian, in terms of his deepest identity, is a saint, a born again child of God, a divine masterpiece, a child of light, a citizen of heaven. Becoming a Christian is not just getting something, no matter how wonderful that something may be. It is becoming someone.”
Where your value and identity use to come from your performance in the old system, now your value and identity comes from being a dearly loved child of God, with the very life of Christ living in you! As Col. 3:4 says, “Christ is now your life.” That’s amazing. I personally went from being a complete and utter failure who couldn’t do anything right, to a dearly loved child of God and a co-heir with Jesus Christ.
And if that is not amazing enough, here is another mindblower. God took sinners, that was our identity before we accepted Christ, who were deserving of an eternity in Hell, and made them righteous in Christ. 2 Cor. 5:21 says, “He (God) made Him (Christ) who knew no sin to become sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (Christ).” Your identity changed the moment you entered into Christ from being a sinner deserving of Hell, totally cut off from God, in fact an enemy of God, to becoming the righteousness of God in Christ! You are righteous right now if you are in Christ. Your righteousness is not because of anything you have done or could ever do. You have become the righteousness of God because you are in Christ. To be righteous means to be in right standing with God. And your being in right standing with God is based completely on your accepting what Jesus Christ did for you.
This truth of our being righteous in Christ is hard for us to comprehend on a human level because, frankly, we can’t verify it with our five senses. You certainly can’t verify it by your feelings because my guess is you probably don’t feel righteous all the time. And you more than likely can’t verify it by your behavior, because my guess again is that you probably don’t always act righteously. And you might not be able to go to your pastor and ask him about being righteous, because in most of our churches, you were no doubt mistakenly taught that you really aren’t righteous and won’t be until you get to Heaven.
I believe there is a lot of bad teaching in the Christian world regarding our righteousness. Maybe you have heard some. Teachings like, “righteousness comes through the confession of sins.” The idea is that if you are up to date on your repentance and confession of sin, then you are righteous. But what happens if you sin and get killed in a freak snowplow accident and don’t have a chance to confess that sin? Are you righteous then or not?
Or maybe you were taught the teaching that says, “because of Jesus’ death on the Cross, God looks at you as if you were righteous.” If God is only looking at you “as if” you were righteous, then that must mean God is pretending. According to this line of teaching we are not really righteous, but because of Jesus death on the cross, God pretends we are.
Here’s the teaching that I was raised with; “God looks at you through the filter of Jesus.” That sounds great and teaches great because I taught people that for years, but the problem is that it’s not Biblical. There is not a verse anywhere that says that God looks at us through Jesus. Jesus is our access to the Father. The only way we can come to God is by receiving Him as our savior. But once we have accepted Christ as savior, we are changed into children of God that are in complete right standing (righteous) with God because of who we are. You are the righteousness of God in Christ right now because of your birth in Christ.
So now that you are a righteous new creation in Christ, what about your behavior? Since righteousness is given to you by your birth in Christ, doesn’t that make good behavior less important? The answer is NO! Your behavior is very important, but not in the way that it use to be so important under the old performance system. You no longer have to perform to become valuable, or to secure your identity like you did under the old system. Your value and your new “righteous” identity are freely given to you in Christ.
You also no longer need to perform to receive Gods acceptance. Since you are in Christ, you are totally and completely accepted by God because you are His child. God only has one standard for acceptance: do you accept His Son Jesus Christ into your life? The moment you accepted Christ, you have fully met God’s standard for acceptance. What you do now – your behavior – cannot make you any more acceptable or any less acceptable to God than you already are.
Our job now as children of God is to do what Romans 12:2 says and offer ourselves to God as a living sacrifice and let Christ live His life through us. God wants to use our human bodies for Christ to live His life through to the world around us. We are “housings” (temples – 1 Cor. 6:16) of the living God. We have the privilege of using what God has given us to bring Him glory. 1 Cor. 10:31 says, “Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” When you mow the grass, mow it to the glory of God. When you go to the grocery store, do that to the glory of God. When you are at work, work your hardest, not for your employer’s sake, but to the glory of God. Whatever you do – not just those things we think of as “Christian things” like witnessing or going to church – do everything to the glory of God.
You Are Not What You Do
As a righteous new creation in Christ, a child of God, a co-heir with Christ, who is immeasurably valuable, unconditionally loved and totally accepted by God, think about these amazing truths. As you listen to these, personalize them. They are already true of you!
– I am no longer what I do.
– I am a child of God by birth and not by my behavior.
– I am a new creation (a new person) in Christ.
– I am chosen and unconditionally loved by God, and He gives me the right to call
Him Abba (Daddy) Father.
– I am totally accepted by God.
– I am the righteousness of God in Christ.
– I am a son of God and a co-heir (equal heir) with Jesus Christ.
– I am a saint.
– My life is hidden with Christ in God.
– Christ is my life.
– I am a partaker in the divine nature (I share in Christ’s life).
– I can do all things through Christ who lives in me and gives me His strength.
Remember: You are not what you do! You are who you are, a righteous, dearly loved child of God, by your birth in Christ!
